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Transit City Plan

Which transit plan do you prefer?

  • Transit City

    Votes: 95 79.2%

  • Ford City

    Votes: 25 20.8%
  • Total voters
    120
Marcanadian said:
That's what I figured, but Doug would argue otherwise. He cited the American Public Transit Association, who says that LRT's have higher operating costs. I'd like to see some real data on this issue and I'm rather surprised that more Councillors aren't asking for this information.
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I want to deflate this APTA operating costs argument, but for the life of me I can't actually find any citation. Chong's submission to the "expert panel report" states it as a fact, but doesn't include a reference. Anyone know what the original source is?
 
"The people of the city have spoken loud and clear. They want subways, folks. They want subways, subways, subways. People hate St. Clair. They don’t want streetcars blocking up our streets." - You Know Who
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If the people of this city hate streetcars so much (and, of course, LRTs are not streetcars, but I suppose that's beside the point), how have we existed for so many years with streetcars on King, on Queen, on Dundas, on College/Carlton/Gerrard, on Spadina, on Bathurst, on Queen's Quay/Lakeshore, on St. Clair... we should have a subway on all streets, by golly!
 
And the greatest majority of the extant ones are in downtown/old city of Toronto. Someone really should remind his worship that he ain't Fred Gardiner.

AoD
 
canmark said:
If the people of this city hate streetcars so much (and, of course, LRTs are not streetcars, but I suppose that's beside the point), how have we existed for so many years with streetcars on King, on Queen, on Dundas, on College/Carlton/Gerrard, on Spadina, on Bathurst, on Queen's Quay/Lakeshore, on St. Clair... we should have a subway on all streets, by golly!
Click to expand...

And the TTC has one of the highest ridership in North America, despite or because of its streetcars, and at one of the highest farebox recovery ratios as well (least subsidized).
 
AlvinofDiaspar said:
See p. 21 - looks like some form of aggregated stats?
http://www.vtpi.org/tranben.pdf

Cited as:
http://www.apta.com/resources/statistics/Pages/default.aspx
Click to expand...

Thanks.

Looks like aggregated numbers that say nothing about actual operating costs, but instead operating costs per passenger. That those less-than-busy LRT lines throughout the US see a greater subsidy than the New York Subway (which is several times larger than all other subway systems in the US combined) is hardly a surprise.

Juking the stats. Should I be surprised?
 
W. K. Lis said:
And the TTC has one of the highest ridership in North America, despite or because of its streetcars, and at one of the highest farebox recovery ratios as well (least subsidized).
Click to expand...

The streetcar routes, like the bus routes, have operating cost recovery ratios of around 55 to 60%. The TTC system-wide cost-recovery ratio is over 70%. So the subway/RT system probably has a cost recovery of around 100%.
 
doady said:
The streetcar routes, like the bus routes, have operating cost recovery ratios of around 55 to 60%. The TTC system-wide cost-recovery ratio is over 70%. So the subway/RT system probably has a cost recovery of around 100%.
Click to expand...

Yes but be careful with that. The subway eats a ton of capital every year to cover basic necessities for operations and equipment renewal.

Most companies would mark a large chunk of that SOGR budget as operations expenses (escalator maintenace/repair, rail repair, tunnel liner inspection/repair, etc.) instead of as capital. TTC has found it easier to receive capital funds than operations funds from the city by packaging up day to day maintenance items into a large project.

It adds up to hundreds of millions per year of subway maintenance work, every single year in the capital budget.


I do think the subway is very much worth-while having. I just don't buy into the TTC funky math, especially when they themselves have never shown us an operations cost-recovery number for the subway which should be trivial to calculate.
 
It's not trivial. Because so many people take the bus TO the subway, it is basically impossible to calculate a fare recovery ratio for the subway or any one part of the network.
 
Just updated my TTC 2030 map in my signature. I've rerouted the subway to go north under the 404 to the Beaver Creek-Commerce Valley area, since if any extension is to be taken on this line, it should be that since there is a mix of employment and residential in that area.

I've also increased the stops on Sheppard to the ones proposed for Transit City, but have kept the stop spacing the same on the other lines. My reasoning is that once Sheppard is complete, people will complain that the stop spacing is too close together, especially when compared to other LRT and BRT projects in the GTA and Southern Ontario. Therefore when constructing Finch and Eglinton surface, they will remove the stops at side streets. In fact, if this happens I would not be surprised if 15 years from now Sheppard is shown as 'Streetcar Rapid Transit' like St. Clair and Spadina, while Finch and Eglinton are shown as full rapid transit lines.
 
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